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Of Headlines & Headlinese: Towards Distinctive Linguistic and Pragmatic ASp la revue du GERAS 60 | 2011 Varia Of headlines & headlinese: Towards distinctive linguistic and pragmatic genericity Shaeda Isani Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/asp/2523 DOI: 10.4000/asp.2523 ISSN: 2108-6354 Publisher Groupe d'étude et de recherche en anglais de spécialité Printed version Date of publication: 1 November 2011 Number of pages: 81-102 ISSN: 1246-8185 Electronic reference Shaeda Isani, « Of headlines & headlinese: Towards distinctive linguistic and pragmatic genericity », ASp [Online], 60 | 2011, Online since 07 October 2014, connection on 02 November 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/asp/2523 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/asp.2523 This text was automatically generated on 2 November 2020. Tous droits réservés Of headlines & headlinese: Towards distinctive linguistic and pragmatic gener... 1 Of headlines & headlinese: Towards distinctive linguistic and pragmatic genericity Shaeda Isani 1 The headline – “one of the most distinctive features of a newspaper” according to David Crystal (1987: 388) – is a form of discourse specific to the written press. It is undoubtedly one of the most creative areas of journalistic writing and, in some aspects, comparable to poetry in that it borrows extensively from linguistic features generally associated with versification. As Don P. Brown and Doug Simpson (2002), copy editor and chief headline writer respectively, claim in their recommendations to future journalists, “Headline writers have to be the best writers at the newspaper.” 2 Headlines are also, according to specialists, the most widely read part of a newspaper – five times more than the body copy – since headlines are scanned not only by initial purchasers but also by the innumerable people in their immediate vicinity. 3 Arguments that the titles announced at the beginning of a TV or radio news bulletin may, to some extent, be considered as headlines are not retained in the framework of this study since they do not possess the textual, linguistic and pragmatic characteristics specific to print headline discourse. 1. Scope of study 4 This article reflects enquiry related to headline discourse and presents preliminary findings based on an analysis of essentially British newspapers, a choice which, if undeniably determined in part by personal culture, is nevertheless essentially due to the unique reputation of the British press in the area of headline creativity. 5 In spite of the abundant research on newspaper headlines and the richness of its genericity, there is a relative dearth of attempts to define the object of research. As Ingrid Mardh (1980: 14) points out in her exhaustive study of the linguistic aspects of ASp, 60 | 2011 Of headlines & headlinese: Towards distinctive linguistic and pragmatic gener... 2 headlines, “No unambiguous definition of ‘headline’ is known to exist. The word headline seems to be used intuitively, also in linguistic studies of headlines.” 6 Given the textual, linguistic and pragmatic complexity of the field, it is perhaps understandable that attempts to provide a definition have confined themselves to the textual functions of headlines as “artefacts” (Graddol, cited in Bell & Garrett 2001: 3) or “visual marks on a page” (Kress & van Leeuwen 2001: 186), echoing the technical definition supplied by the online Newspaper Designer’s Handbook: “Large type running above or beside a story to summarize its content. Also called a head.” 7 Mardh (1980) herself adopts a similar minimalist approach and defines the object of her research somewhat prosaically as: “A headline is set in a size and style of type which is different from the running text. It consists of one or more decks, which also differ typographically from one another” (1980: 14). 8 Contrary to such approaches, in the framework of this study, the term headline is not viewed as a textual artefact. Neither is it viewed as a deck entity (superheadline, headline, subheadline and lead). The focus of study here is limited to the headline, the most visually outstanding component of the deck. Hence, in the following deck (The Economist, 20 January 2007), only the central unit comes under the scope of this discussion: Death of the record store [in red] Facing the music [in bold and larger font size] Britain’s music stores are being squeezed off the high street [in smaller font size and bold] 9 This article posits that, within the multifunctional and multiple umbrella genre that is generally referred to as headlines, there exist certain characteristics not common to all headlines but sufficiently recurrent in others to constitute a sub-genre which we propose to distinguish from the parent genre by the term headlinese. For illustration purposes, core reference is essentially made to contemporary editions of four “quality” British press organs, The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph, and supplemented by references to other news organs such as certain British tabloids and online press articles (the BBC), and an occasional American newspaper. 10 In a first part, we propose a theoretical framework to demonstrate the genericity of a specific sub-genre (van Dijk 1988; Swales 1990; Dor 2003; Gattani 2005) and then proceed to distinguish between the umbrella genre of “generic headlines” and the sub- genre “headlinese” on the basis of a pragmatic approach and reader accessibility theories with regard to the sub-genre’s defining characteristic, opacity. Finally, we explore the notion of a discourse community specific to headlinese and, in conclusion, suggest envisaging a paradigm shift which relates headlinese to other genres presenting similar characteristics. 2. Genre 11 Initially related to literary genres, genre studies are today a cross-disciplinary field which interests researchers in linguistic, rhetorical, social and even scientific disciplines. One of the most prominent contributions to non-literary genre theory is undoubtedly Swales’ (1990), who studies genre as an institutionalised mediator between individual and institution principally in the framework of academic communication for applied ends. ASp, 60 | 2011 Of headlines & headlinese: Towards distinctive linguistic and pragmatic gener... 3 12 In spite of its focus on academic settings, Swales’ analysis of genre, speech community and discourse community has contributed to the extension of genre theories to such non-academic and non-professional domains as skate board communities (Herino & Isani 1994) and digital communication (Breure 2001). In the same exploratory vein, we analyse headlines as genre on the basis of the framework proposed by Swales in the following complementary definitions: Genres themselves are classes of communicative events which typically possess features of stability, name recognition and so on. Genre-type communication events […] consist of texts themselves (spoken, written, or a combination) plus encoding or decoding procedures as moderated by genre-related aspects of text-role and text- environment. These processing procedures can be viewed as tasks. The acquisition of genre skills depends on previous knowledge of the world, giving rise to content schemata, knowledge of prior texts, giving rise to formal schemata, and experience with appropriate tasks. (1990: 9-10). A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognised by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style. (1990: 58) 13 These two definitions carry several areas of focus particularly relevant to our study and which relate to our field of application as shown in Table 1: Table 1. Genre definition with regard to headlinese as a sub-genre Genre theory factor Applied factor 1. “a class of communicative act” Headlines/Headlinese “texts” 2. “encoding or decoding procedures” Journalist/text/reader “processing procedures” interpretation 3. “the members […] share some set of communicative Journalists/Readers purposes” “the expert members of the parent discourse community” 4. “[…] shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and Textual, linguistic and cultural influences and constrains the choice of content and style.” parameters of headlinese 14 In view of the above elements, we hope to have established the overall theoretical validity of the genre construct with regard to headlines and now propose to focus on the communicative function they seek to fulfil. 3. Functions of headlines 15 Van Dijk (1988) attributes a cataphoric and informative function to headlines by defining their essential function as that of summarising the content of the article they precede: ASp, 60 | 2011 Of headlines & headlinese: Towards distinctive linguistic and pragmatic gener... 4 Each news item in the press has a Headline […] and many have a Lead, whether marked off by special printing type or not. We also have an elementary rule for them: Headline precedes Lead, and together they precede the rest of the news item. Their structural function is also clear: Together they express the major topics of the text. That is, they function as an initial summary. […] The semantic constraint is obvious: Headline + Lead summarize the news text and express the semantic macrostructure. (1988: 53) 16 While van Dijk’s interpretation is entirely valid with regard to the function of the headline when placed within the
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